


Jeunes cœurs, tout vous est favorable

by antirococoreaction



Category: French History RPF, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Art History, Canon Era, Canonical Character Death, Complicated Relationships, Gen, Historical, Historical Accuracy, Homoeroticism, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Old Friends, Old Men In Love, Period Typical Attitudes, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Relationships, Queer History, Queer Themes, References to Depression
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-05
Updated: 2020-12-05
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:00:18
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,118
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27894223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/antirococoreaction/pseuds/antirococoreaction
Summary: Abandoned in Paris by the willing exile of his friend and teacher, David, and watching the slow disintegration of the art he holds dear, Antoine-Jean Gros withdraws from the world and into a fog of memory and nostalgia until Grantaire arrives. Willful, self-destructive, charming, and deeply in need of guidance and friendship, Gros cannot help being reminded of his old friend Girodet, and the time they spent together in Italy. But is it too late to return to the world that actually exists, and would Gros prefer to remain in the past?
Relationships: Antoine-Jean Gros & Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson
Comments: 4
Kudos: 4





	Jeunes cœurs, tout vous est favorable

**Author's Note:**

  * For [MagicalDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalDragon/gifts).
  * Inspired by [On the Path to Elysium](https://archiveofourown.org/works/20006305) by [MagicalDragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/MagicalDragon/pseuds/MagicalDragon). 



> I owe this story to MagicalDragon. His _On the Path to Elysium_ and our numerous discussions about art, queer history, assorted revolutions and the similarities between the historical Girodet and fictional Grantaire started me off on this.
> 
> The title is a line from Lully's _Passacaille d'Armide (Les Plaisirs ont choisi pour asile)_ : Young hearts, everything is favorable for you.
> 
> And since I always work with music, there is a playlist [here](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0Wb7rPonzY7bWwXSiNTF0p?si=qY_ySAHNTvWbKWMygmocJg), which I'll be updating with each chapter.
> 
> Rated M for later chapters.

Paris is like a mother who resolutely shoves the newborn from her breast upon hearing its first wail for succour. If her teeming children wail and shudder, if they sicken or die, such concerns matter little to the city; therefore her offspring must grow fast and strong and sly, warring for scraps to be nourished at all. This, thinks Antoine-Jean Gros, is what accounts for the curious and tender brutality of your native Parisian: his spit and bluster, his hauteur coupling awkwardly with his cloying attentiveness. Though he is himself one of this great and fearsome city’s offspring, Antoine can never quite reconcile himself with her: a misplaced fairy child, Juno’s hideous, ill-starred son. He had learned to walk upon her uneven cobbles, to pass calm and steady through her roiling tumults. He had sought nourishment in the bosom of her greatest institutions even as she quaked through her most violent distress. Yet even now, in the midst of his fifty-second year, Antoine feels more acutely foreign than he had as a Frenchman in Italy, or as a useless, sickly artist embedded in the Emperor’s army.

When Antoine is consumed, in less generous moments, by thoughts of the Revolution, when he is angered- however unfairly- at the disasters it wrought for their school, he thinks of Parisians as spiders. The streets are their web; they are born sensitive to the slightest shudder on the string and hasten to every disruption, be it to repair or to feast. In other moments, however, when he is consumed by despair rather than fear, Antoine thinks of them all as kindred to the innocent populace of Pompeii and Herculaneum: rich and indolent, delighting in their proximity to chaos. A people much given to looking upon the rumbling, trembling mouth of their mountain of discontent with the same contemptuous familiarity as Pompeians once beheld Vesuvius.

The griefs and outrages that bred the Revolution surely seem a matter long past to the gaudy youths that amble by in the street, with their rose-red cheeks and downy upper lips, their cinched waists and fragrant locks. Even to the average bourgeois those conflicts must seem, if not quite ended, then best to finally let scab and scar, or wobble and ache in the mouth like unpulled teeth. Yet Antoine feels something of that trembling even now. He feels it in the swelling populace of the streets, the rough-clad laborers and apprentices, conspicuous for their burred accents and coarse homespun. In the alchemical shift in the air from the factories that increasingly line the Seine. In the desperate attempts to control the bread prices, their artificially low figures chanted like a spell to ward off future unrest. He sees it most notably, however, in the set jaws and firm, manly gazes of the students who throng the city: not precisely affluent, not precisely poor, a far cry from poissards or sans-culottes, but born with a love of liberty nonetheless, and unleashed in this new world with a copy of Maréchal in one hand and Plato in the other. The inverse of the terror of the jeunesse dorée with their clubs, their affected style, their seething hatred of the poor and the radical.

But in the honest, sleepless hours that lie beyond midnight, Antoine can admit that it is more than merely the streets that leave him ill at ease. Of late, even the sacred confines of the atelier- which he persists in calling David’s, despite his dear maître’s exile- trouble him. Once it stood upon the towering cliffs of the French School like a lighthouse: guiding light and safe haven, hearth and home. But the restless, rising waves of critique and mockery have already devoured, in slow and steady bites, that great bulwark from underneath them. Now the atelier itself seems no more than a shell of its former glory, beautiful and solemn as any other shattered ruin. A dusty memory, its meaningless motions performed by shades struggling to resurrect their long-dead past: a veritable host of ghostly apostles praying over an unrising saviour.

Yes, that brief age of gods and heroes is dying, even Antoine acknowledges as much, though he writes otherwise to his maître. It has given way to an abject mediocrity that stiffens Antoine’s joints and clouds his eyes more than age itself: these drab coats and pinching shoes, these throttling cravats and bristling whiskers, these troubadors and picturesque tableaux beneath painted windows and these obscene sums that kings and nobles alike scatter before their favoured artists. All the artists of France are tamed to hand now, as surely as ever they were under the absolute reign of kings- except M. David, who has abandoned them all. And as if to tame them further with cowardice, they must contend, too, with the howling beast comprised of critics and the popular crowd- a hydra suckled at the teat of pure stupidity, as Girodet once called them- snapping at the heels of the slightest independence, crushing in its maw anything that threatened to recall the radical, the Jacobin.

Perhaps that is why Antoine lives for the arrival of Maître David’s battered letters from Brussels. They reassure him of his faith, his commitments; on particularly dark days they recall him to his sanity.The parchment, cracked open, seems to exude the scent of home, the familiar traces of a pine-sharp gentleman's perfume. It is like a father’s embrace, and Antoine longs- at present and with all his soul- to be embraced, to feel himself small again and surrounded: beloved not only by his dear friend and maître, but by the men who’d been his brother artists. Gérard, Girodet, Isabey: an entire cosmology of gods amongst whose company he had been dashed down, no more than some confused mortal boy thrown in amongst men.

It is the contradiction of Antoine’s heart: that he recalls those days so fondly despite his lingering misgivings at the horrors of the Revolution, much less his disgust at the depredations throughout the long and restless years following Thermidor. As though he were unmoved by all those who survived the guillotine, and now lived but half-lives, severed from family members and old friends by the very blade that missed their own throats. As though the entire city, including the the former radicals amongst it, not embraced the end of the Revolution; danced and drunk and gambled more furiously, made war and made love. As though they had not also turned bitter and petty: daring, with hollow shows of decadence, a renewal of ancient hatreds and fresh tragedies, the smiting hand of the God of the poor.

Yet often Antoine grieves losing the men of those days of revolutionary struggle, though he was never truly one of them. He longs for their liveliness, the profundity of their belief and intensity of sentiment, their performances of antique heroism. There will come a time for them again, and soon, Antoine supposes. He is not inured to the bubbling discontent, the abject poverty. He is only, as he has ever been, powerless in the face of it: a leaf scudding along the river’s surface. And these new men? The students he sees today, who in all likelihood will be the revolutionaries of tomorrow? They are like some great palimpsest, chipped in places to show what came before: scratch their surface and you will find Saint-Just; beneath Saint-Just’s marble, austere face, you will find Aristogeiton.

*

It is not the thought of days to come, however, that Antoine greets each morning upon entering the atelier. Rather, it is the fog of memory. It is neither his own school nor his own students that he sees when he opens the doors, but earlier times, different faces. A mote of late-summer sunlight transforms Antoine back into the college student he had once been, shyly mixing paints in the corner, innocent to the point of inadvertent piety. A winter’s windowpane recalls the burning imprint of the maître’s trembling, out-flung hand as he scrabbled for purchase on whorls of frosted glass, his great height felled by news of Drouais’s untimely death in Rome. A rumble of thunder summons Girodet’s voice regaling the atelier with ferocious tales of the Bastille’s fall, of hearts torn out by pulsing roots and ragged heads born aloft on pikes- all while perched amiably upon the model’s plinth like a fallen angel, his fingers idly circling the youth’s bare knee 'til he giggles.

It is not that Antoine lacks interest in his own students. No. He is scrupulously solicitous of their concerns, their health, their mounting debts (so easy to accrue as a youth, easier still as a Parisian). He takes joy in their successes, the glories they bring the atelier. He devotes his time to each in turn, without bestowing favour, and knows every name and face. Just as the dreamer devotes his entire imagination to any chimaera that presents itself to his helpless mind during the night, his students are the whole of his concern between eleven and one. But it is his memories, his waking dreams of the past- what he calls ‘sweet deceptions’ and Madame calls ‘little fancies’- that remain his reality. He wanders about the atelier with the taste of uneaten meals and undrunk wine in his mouth, unspoken words trapped in his throat; his arms press untouched bodies, and his fingers chafe from unheld brushes.

It has been thus for many years now, at least since his world came unstitched with the fall of the Emperor, before being woven anew to force his conformity to the warp and weft of this new world. It _is_ thus, until Sabatier arrives, bringing Grantaire with him.

Like so many others, both men arrive chasing the lingering toll of glory. Antoine promises every potential student the same thing: an insight into the grand style of a dying age, mingled with the colour and passion of the new. He promises the skills necessary to win the Prix de Rome. What he cannot promise is the talent and passion to accompany his teaching- the talent and the passion of a David or Drouais, of a Gérard or Girodet. After all, he cannot promise what he does not possess himself. What Antoine cannot tell them either, for he has found no words for it himself, is that the genius of David’s atelier lay not in what could be taught, but in what had brought each student to its hallowed doors: the search for meaning and connection, for a solidarity of purpose and understanding.

Antoine, therefore, promises Sabatier and Grantaire nothing more than he promises anyone else. He offers them his lessons and councils with all his heart, and they, in turn, immediately begin to toil obediently on their faint echoes and commonalities. This is the unfortunate reality of any atelier: mediocrity, and much of it. Sabatier and Grantaire will live and die, Antoine thinks, in obscurity: knowing neither the heights that would see them feted and crowned with laurels, nor the abject lows of the hundreds of European youths who can only dream of glimpsing the inside of a French atelier while making charming enough sketches for rural buyers. Sabatier and Grantaire will neither exult art, nor suffer for it. More likely, they will turn their hands to making copies or else give the profession away entirely to become shopkeepers. Either way they will marry, set up respectable little houses with abundant and respectable little children. They will toss the odd coin to the beggars they splash mud on while rushing by, murmer about the deserving poor, read _Le_ _Moniteur_ religiously and resolutely close their shutters to Paris’s periodic blusters of violent discontent. They will die, in the end, in perfectly respectable anonymity, their time in the atelier serving as no more than a peculiar anecdote for their obituaries.

Antoine knows all this with certainty born of experience. Yet in the weeks that follow the men's arrival in the atelier, he finds himself increasingly aware of Grantaire’s presence within it (or lack therof, for he is absent on any day directly preceding or following one of his periodic outrages of celebration or commiseration). Indeed, with Grantaire’s ringing voice and theatrics, his occasional turn to the acrobatic, it is hardly possible to remain ignorant of him. There is something about Grantaire that crackles through the close, heavy air of the atelier, just as one sometimes seems to feel the charge of electricity before a thunderstorm.

Antoine cannot initially grasp the nature of his feeling for the young man, much less why it should spark and kindle at all. He cannot place the immediate warmth of familiarity that he feels, far less the aching knot of guilt accompanying it. Nonetheless, he feels as if he were confronted not by a youth, but by the mournful shade of some companion he had never found time to bid farewell to. It is a nameless sensation, yet no less tangible for the absence of label.

One day, however, Antoine wakes to it. Perhaps it is Grantaire’s ringing laughter that does it, or the flick of his wrist as he juggles apples. Perhaps it is the particular darkness of Grantaire’s unkempt, unfashionably long hair grown out into thick waves. Perhaps it is how he sits at his easel, or the scrutiny he gives each sketch. Perhaps it is all of these things, one piled atop the next ‘til the final picture presents itself at last: Antoine sees, finally, not just Grantaire but his own ancient comrade, his defender, his oldest and dearest friend, Girodet.

With this realisation, the malady of Antoine’s feverish memory seems to break and recede for the first time in years. The locus of his healing is Grantaire, as though the young man’s very presence had lanced and drained the swollen burden of the past, of the years in which Antoine had withdrawn from his former brothers and friends, swaddling himself in recollections of a golden past. If Antoine now finds himself bared raw to the world, stripped of all protection from it, then there is nonetheless some relief in being able to attend to the news of the day, or enjoy a piece of fruit without comparing it to the savour of wild strawberries in a late Italian spring, or value a day’s sunlight without seeing in it some faded echo of bygone years. To recognise at last that the hands he puts to the door, old and lined as they are, are truly his own rather than those of some decrepit stranger, sewn to Antoine’s body like one of Géricault’s disembodied limbs.

Antoine finds himself circling the atelier with increasing regularity, drawn into a gyre rather than staring out windows. If he is more attentive in general, then he is particularly so to Grantaire. The young man struggles in amiable, bearish ignorance with every law of perspective. His drapery severs heads and foreshortens limbs. It is best not to speak of certain colours, or even allow him anywhere near them. Grantaire has none of Girodet’s native ease and consumptive talent (indeed, not even a spoonful of Wicar’s cumbersome, draughtsman-like labour). He has neither the extraordinary, lapidary beauty of Girodet’s too-exquisite figures, nor his evanescent light.

And yet. _Yet_. There _is_ something of Girodet in Grantaire, something essential to his art that stands like a small flame against the whole of the night, a thing as easily huffed out by an errant gust of wind as fanned into conflagration. It is something in the sight and in the heart, a certain devotion to the heroic, accompanied by an equally certain knowing laughter at them. It is the very thing Antoine first perceived in Grantaire’s test for the atelier, the sacred mystery at the heart of the French School’s success, a kernel of truth buried in the core of the grand style of history painting. After all, Antoine had not accepted Grantaire’s initial sketch for its quality, which was only barely passable in a technical sense, but rather for the feeling the young man imbued his faltering, too-hasty lines with.

Antoine’s sight is beginning to fade, but he does not miss the titles of the books that Grantaire seems to perpetually haul about under one thick arm: the odes of Anacreon, Lucian’s satires, copies of Plato’s earlier, less ascetic philosophies. Nor does Antoine miss Grantaire's downcast glances at some of his fellow students, the lingering interest in one or two models, or- dangerously- to his friend Sabatier. Antoine knows well enough this economy of gazes after all, how they may be exchanged or declined. They were no foreign currency in Maître David’s atelier.

There are differences between the two of course. Where Girodet parried criticism with the barbed whip of his tongue, the stinging lash of his pen, Grantaire welcomes it as a penitent welcomes the sting of self-flagellation. Where Girodet wore confidence as Talma once wore Caesar’s robes, Grantaire swathes himself in a mummers’ rags of self-abasement. Where Girodet knew himself the inheritor of friendships that made him kin to Macedonian conquerors and Achaean heroes before the walls of Troy, Grantaire’s private shame hangs above him like a cloud, and hunches his heavy shoulders with the anticipation of its rain. At times Grantaire’s misery, as much as the remnant drunkenness tangible in the air about him, makes him resemble nothing so much as a mustachioed blancmange sliding about the atelier. Girodet, conversely, would have tumbled through the atelier doors garlanded in the scent of red wine, fresh sweat and noonday sun, undone and bare-breasted: a grinning, red-lipped Bacchus by way of Cupid, merely lacking wings or a crown of vines.

Grantaire will never compose the miracle of an _Endymion_ , Antoine thinks. Not because of his lack of technical proficiency, which it still remains possible to remedy. Not from an absence of vision, either, for he suspects Grantaire already composes- at least within his mind- a veritable tome of drawings far more intimate, if still plausibly Classical (though perhaps more in the vein of illustrating Catullus than Homer). No, he will never compose an Endymion for fear of it. Grantaire, Antoine thinks, knows too well, and minds too much, that paintings are a mirror upon their time and the soul: a reflection of both their age and their creator.

And if there is a single emotion that Antoine-Jean Gros understands, it is fear.

In short, Antoine possesses both hope in Grantaire, and the most profound despair for him.

It is for this reason, or so he tells himself- this and not the past, nor the many kindnesses he has yet to repay, nor the fresh longing to see his old friend- that Antoine decides at last to call at the house of Endymion himself.

**Author's Note:**

> **Notes:**
> 
> All of the commentary on the state of the arts and politics in France during the mid-1820s, as well as the characterisation, is drawn from the actual content of letters that were written between, or to, David's students. At numerous points, Gros refers to David by the title of 'maître', rather than by name or as 'M. David'- this is in keeping with Gros's letters, in which David is referred to almost exclusively (and affectionately) as 'maître' or 'mon cher maître'. 
> 
> Gros mentions being a college student and a boy amongst men: this is accurate. He was fourteen at the time of entering the studio in 1785, and still continuing his studies at the Collège Mazarin/Collège des Quatre-Nations. Most of his fellow students were adults even by today's standards.
> 
> Sylvain Maréchal was a proto-socialist writer and political theorist, author of the _Manifeste des Égaux_ that provided the written, theoretical underpinnings of the Conspiracy of Equals. The jeunesse dorée were righ-wing thugs who periodically enacted political violence against 'radicals' (and potential radicals), or staged protests (such as publicly burning radical writings) post-Thermidor. There are several mentions of David and/or members of David's school being harassed by them. 
> 
> Girodet's tales of the Revolution are based on his [sketches](https://www.gettyimages.com.au/detail/news-photo/sketch-of-the-heads-of-the-french-nobility-impaled-on-news-photo/517480070) of the aftermath of the Fall of the Bastille.
> 
> Gros's references to Endymion relate to one of Girodet's most famous and popular paintings, _Le Sommeil d'Endymion_. Girodet also, in a letter to François Gérard, also referred to himself by that name.
> 
> François Talma was a famous actor in the late 18th Century, and well into the 19th. He regularly played historical figures, including Caesar.
> 
>  **Sources:**  
>  _Emulation: Making Artists for Revolutionary France,_ Thomas Crow  
>  _Le Peintre Louis-David,_ J.L. Jules David  
>  _Histoire de la vie et de la mort du Baron Gros,_ J. Tripier le Franc  
>  _Lettres adressées au Baron François Gérard peintre d'histoire,_ published by Baron Gérard  
>  _Louis-David son école et son temps,_ E. J. Delécluze  
>  _Oeuvres posthumes de Girodet-Trioson,_ published by P. A. Coupin


End file.
